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Posts Tagged ‘linkage’

The Urban Tarot — now with bonus content!

I mentioned before that a friend of mine is doing a Kickstarter project to raise the funds needed to complete his Urban Tarot Deck, right?

Well, I got to chatting with him. And after a bit of behind-the-scenes scheming, I have a bit of news for you all.

If the project gets funded, the guidebook for the deck will include a short piece of introductory fiction, written by yours truly.

But wait — there’s more!

There is also a new reward level: the Marie Brennan Package. One first-edition numbered deck, the tarot guidebook signed by both me and Robert Scott (the artist), AND — specific to this package only — a signed hardcover copy of With Fate Conspire. (This is, after all, an urban tarot deck, and that is decidedly the most urban of my novels.)

I’m really stoked to be a part of this project. As I said before, I’ve been hoping for years to see this finished; well, as of me posting this, Rob is halfway to his goal, and there are still three weeks to go. If you already have With Fate Conspire, check out the other reward packages; you can get the guidebook (and therefore the fiction) at practically any level of backing, or splurge and enjoy the talents of one of the deck models. Alas, Chris Hall’s guided tour of the American Museum of Natural History has already been claimed, but I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of Jessica Hammer’s knowledge of game design, and the deliciousness of the food at Tse Wei Lim’s restaurant. (In fact, if you live in the Boston area, you should go to Journeyman at some point regardless.)

Head on over and take a look. And if you’ll be at FOGcon this weekend, I’ll be bringing some flyers with me, to spread the word far and wide.

Staring it in the eye

Every time I try to start drafting a post about Trayvon Martin, I run up against the impossible reach of the issue.

There’s enough to say about the kid to fill an entire post, about the injustice of what happened to him. But I can’t tease those things out from all the other things: Zimmerman and his history of neighborhood vigilantism; Geraldo Rivera and the bullshit about hoodies; the appalling failure to investigate this crime as it should have been, when it should have been; the Sanford Police Department and their previous failures to deal appropriately with this kind of thing; the Stand Your Ground law in Florida and elsewhere (which I had not heard of before, and which makes my blood run cold); all the way out to parenting black children in this country, or ALEC and its influence on the legislative agenda of many states. It’s some kind of monster out of Lovecraft, with tentacles reaching everywhere — and I don’t mean that metaphor in a trivializing fashion. I look at this, and feel my sanity die a little. Along with my hope for humanity.

It’s too much to take in, let alone talk about coherently.

Especially when my thoughts sweep outward to take in Shaima Alawadi, or the people whose names no one asks about. And skimming through my browser window to find where those tabs had got to, I passed a bunch I’m keeping for a later post, about capitalism and economic inequality and I’m fooling myself if I pretend these things don’t tie together down at the root.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist was talking the other day about how depressing The Wire is, not despite of but because of its brilliance: it shows you how deeply ingrained these issues are in the institutions that make up our society, and how near to impossible change is. I haven’t watched more than maybe half a dozen episodes of the show because I can’t deal with looking that sort of thing in the eye; I need to stay away in order to preserve my belief that we can improve things. But the problem isn’t in the TV show — it’s in the real world. And sometimes you can’t avoid staring it in the eye.

The Sanford Police Department will likely face some consequences. Maybe we’ll get the Stand Your Ground laws struck down in a few places. But hacking out those roots and digging the whole mess out of the soil of our country . . . I don’t know how you do that. Days like this one, I wonder if you can.

two pieces of anthology news

Clockwork Phoenix 2! Is now available as an e-book (like the first one a while ago). You can buy it from Weightless Books, or from Amazon US or UK. (More information here.)

For those who may not recall, this one has my short story “Once a Goddess.”

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InterGalactic Awards Anthology Vol. I! Will be FREE this weekend on Amazon, from Saturday through Monday. Apart from some seriously awesome people like Peter Beagle and Aliette de Bodard (aliettedb), it also includes stories from me and a personal friend, Von Carr. Mine is “A Heretic by Degrees” (which is a Driftwood story), and hers has the fabulous title of “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” — the best post-apocalypses story about a combat nun I’ve ever read. ^_^

It can be yours this weekend!

three links on gender in fandom

Dear Wizards: Why Failing Less at Gender in 5E Would Be Good For Your Bottom Line

The Girl Geek Community is Hidden, Ever Wondered Why?

“Geek girls” and the problem of self-objectification

And for a bonus, the tumblr Escher Girls, which I may or may not have linked to before, but is a brain-liquefying collection of everything that is horribly, horribly wrong with the visual depiction of women in comics/anime/gaming art/etc.

It isn’t on par with the political issues we’re facing right now, but I see no reason why I can’t decry sexism in multiple forms at once.

Pick-a-mix

I had a bunch of things I meant to post yesterday, but ended up getting all political instead. (I am heartened, though, by the news that at least some organizations are seeing a funding surge. And there’s at least one doctor advocating for civil disobedience when the law would threaten the rights and well-being of patients.)

But! The point of this is to post the other stuff!

I neglected to mention this on the 16th, but I have my usual post up at SF Novelists, talking about audience expectations, and whether it’s better to be wrong or right about where the story is going.

Next, I’d like to point you at a friend’s Kickstarter project, for The Urban Tarot Deck. The existing art for this is pretty awesome; I own a print of the Princess of Swords, and kniedzw has the Magician. I’ve been hoping for years that he’d be able to finish the deck (and must confess to a hope that if this project is a success, he’ll finish his Silhouette Tarot, which I like even more). So mosey on over to take a look, and if you like what you see, send a few bucks his way.

(Okay, full truth? I am sorely tempted to shell out silly amounts of money to be on one of the remaining cards. A bunch of the models for the existing cards are friends of ours, and I love what Rob did with them; it would be nifty to see what he’d do with me. But, um. Kind of silly amounts of money, for something I cannot even pretend is a business expense.)

Third, cogent analysis of why John Carter tanked. I confess that if anybody ever makes a movie of my books, I would love to have control over various aspects . . . but then I see what happens when somebody with no distance from the subject gets to run the show, and I reconsider. I’d like to believe I would be sensible enough to listen to other people’s advice, but who knows? I might be just as short-sighted and detrimental as Stanton was.

Fourth, fellow geeks of a certain stripe may be interested in the trailer for a live-action Rurouni Kenshin movie. I have to admit, watching it breaks my brain a little; I’ve been a fan of the anime for (ye gods) nearly half my life, and Suzukaze Mayo is the voice of Himura Kenshin. The guy in the trailer . . . is a guy. (When a friend told me they were filming a live-action movie, I asked, only half-joking, whether they were going to cast a woman as Kenshin.) But there are things flashing by in the trailer that have me bouncing in my seat; does that gatling gun mean we’re going to get Aoshi and the Oniwabanshu stuff? I must watch and see. 🙂

And, to make five (non-political) things, I leave you with The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions.

Your one-stop shop for SCREAMING RAGE

So I’ve been mentioning lately the situation surrounding women’s rights in the United States (and sometimes elsewhere) — a situation so appalling, that word is utterly inadequate for describing how I feel about it. The best I can do is to point you at Soraya Chemaly’s “Legislators: Women Are Not Cows and Pigs,” which contains a handy run-down of the various pieces of jaw-droppingly retrograde legislation being pushed by conservative extremists. It’s all there, from the suggestion that we should put a woman’s life at risk rather than remove a dead fetus from inside her, to the idea that an employer should be allowed to ask why his female employee wants birth control pills, and then fire her if she says it’s to prevent pregnancy.

I wish I were making this shit up.

I am not as good at eloquent rage as Cat Valente is. (Go read that post for a fairly accurate picture of my current internal state.) But I wanted to say, that fundraiser I’m doing? I attached it to the WoT blogging because I thought, this stuff usually has more success when it’s got some kind of result attached to it, even a silly one. But really, the point isn’t for me to eviscerate WoT merchandising. The point is to raise money for the people fighting back against these attacks. The point is to help Planned Parenthood provide health care to low-income women (though that doesn’t help much when the state of Texas knowingly chucks those services out the window), or to make sure battered women have a safe place to go.

If you can spare any money for a cause like that, please do. And do the things that don’t require money, too: contact your legislators. Speak out. Make it clear that women are not farm animals, that we have a right to privacy and control of our own bodies, that our sexual behavior is no business of the state’s. Fight back.

I want to believe these are the death throes of an old way, and we’ll break through into something better. But that won’t happen if we don’t fight.

Books read, February 2012

Only, um, a lot late.

Something interesting I’ve noticed: so far this year, every bit of fiction I’ve read has been by a female writer. (There’s been some male-authored nonfiction and gaming material.) Granted, partly that’s because of the disproportionate weight carried by Diana Wynne Jones. But given that I’ve been working entirely from my own bookshelf in choosing what to read, that actually makes me kind of happy; it means I am not, as many people do, skewing unconsciously toward men in terms of what books I read and talk about.

On the other hand, there’s this bit of number-crunching, which shows to the extent that we’re approaching parity on book reviews, a lot of that is driven by women reviewing women, counterbalancing the men who who mostly review men. And even then, we’re not at equal numbers yet.

Anyway, last month’s books — before we get any further into this month.

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fundraising reminder

In the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke — and when I’ve been reading articles like this one on funding cuts in the UK for domestic violence shelters — it seems an opportune time to remind everybody about the random little fundraiser I’m doing.

More details at that link, but the short form is that, as a part of my ongoing analysis, if you donate to a women’s charity — you choose which one; it could be a shelter or rape counseling or pro-choice or anti-discrimination or whatever — and send me the info, I will buy used copies of various bits of Wheel of Time merchandise, and blog about them for your entertainment.

Because I’m really tired of feeling like we’re backsliding on women’s rights, like the Overton window has shifted to the point where we’ve got a major presidential candidate speaking out against all forms of birth control, and people cheering him for it. So I hope this encourages some of you to donate to a worthy cause.

for those with an interest in LARPs

My friend mikevonkorff has been doing a series of posts about live-action roleplaying games — their design and execution, what players look for in a game and how they pursue it, etc. Chewy stuff, especially since a lot of his commentators are part of a circle that has played a bunch of games together, but I’m coming from a totally different gaming community. Makes for some very enlightening comparisons.

I’m taking a particular interest in this because kniedzw and I are likely to be running a one-shot LARP based on Changeling: The Dreaming in a few months. (If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be around Memorial Day weekend, and think you might like to play, drop me a line.) I haven’t done a lot of LARP-running, so it helps to watch other people talk about the stuff you need to consider, and the different ways those topics can be approached. Especially when those people do things very differently than I do.

Anyway, if you have any interest in the topic, check his posts out. And feel free to jump in, even on the older posts; the more perspectives, the merrier.

Things Not to Say

Hey, guys?

If you are upset about something, and you want to yell at somebody about it, it’s worth taking a moment to make sure you’re yelling at the right person.

For example, do not blame the author for Amazon’s decision to ship print copies of a novel two weeks before the sale date, but not to send out the e-books at the same time. Aside from the fact that retailers aren’t supposed to ship anything before the street date, the author has precisely ZERO control over what Amazon chooses to do. (And is probably even more upset than you are, because that potentially screws her over in career-affecting ways.)

And if you are upset about something, take a careful look at how you’re expressing your feelings.

For example, is it productive to call the author “stupid,” “greedy,” “ungrateful,” or “a narcissist”? Probably not.

And it is definitely not productive — nor even okay — to call her a “bitch,” a “whore,” or a “cunt.”

Seriously. The person on the other end of that e-mail you’re about to send? Is a person. One who, in this case, has no actual control over the thing you are upset about; she didn’t cause it, and she can’t fix it, and she’s upset about it, too. But even if those things weren’t true . . . what the hell, people. How fragile is your world if the UTTER APOCALYPTIC DISASTER of NOT BEING ABLE TO GET YOUR E-BOOK NOW NOW NOW justifies heaping misogynistic abuse on the person who produces the thing you love?

Please. Be smart enough to aim your criticism in an appropriate direction, not at a fellow victim. But more than anything . . . act like a human, not a hyena.

a saga of ye gods and little stick figures

I know some of you read The Order of the Stick, one of the oldest and best D&D parodies on the web. But whether you do or not, I have to direct you, with suitable awe, at the saga of its Kickstarter project.

Creator Rich Burlew set out to raise $57,750 to get one of the collections, War and XPs, back into print. He blew through that goal in less than twenty-four hours. As I write this post, he has raised $868,072 — and that number will certainly have gone up by the time I hit “post.”

You can follow the tale via the project updates. Scroll down to the bottom to find the first one, and then do the same for the more recent ones. It is, I think, an amazing testament both to what Kickstarter can do, and how to do a Kickstarter project well. Burlew has done an excellent job of adapting to the overwhelming success of his fundraiser; not only did he rapidly set new goals (reprinting other out-of-print books, increasing print runs, covering the increased expenses for all the rewards packages), he found a lot of clever ways to reward people for their support. And throughout, he’s been highly transparent about the entire process, so that nobody is going to walk away thinking he’s put their money to a use they didn’t expect. (If anybody is displeased with what he’s done so far, they’re still free to cancel their support: nothing is final until the fundraiser ends.)

It’s a marvel in a number of respects. And if you have any interest in this kind of crowdsourcing model, his experience is worth studying.

Three things make something closer to a post

First: it’s the sixteenth, and that means I’m over at SF Novelists again. This time I’m continuing my points from last month, with “Competence is hot, part two.”

Second: the same guy who does the Page 69 thing also had me contribute to My Book, the Movie (reposted over here). Long-time readers of this journal may recall that I’ve been on that blog previously, when I talked about my mental castings for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie; this time I update it with A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire.

And third: if you’re going to be at FOGcon, then a) so am I and b) I’m also going to be one of the critiquers in the writing workshop, along with David Levine and Cassie Alexander. I don’t know when signup for that closes, but I believe you still have time to join, if that’s your cup of tea.

Since I’m combining things here, I’ll leave comments open — but on the competence thing, please do go leave your thoughts over on the SF Novelists site, rather than here. No login required, but if you’re a first-time commenter please give me a little while to fish it out of the moderation queue.

Two bits of news

First of all, I’m featured over at “The Page 69 Test” (here and here), talking about page 69 of With Fate Conspire, and whether it’s a good sample of what the book is like or not.

And second, the Intergalactic Awards Anthology is out, containing my Driftwood story “A Heretic by Degrees” — as well as stories by a couple of friends of mine, aliettedb‘s “Horus Ascending” and Von Carr’s absolutely fabulous “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain.”

And now, back to cleaning my living room.

my taste in fanfic

I don’t read all that much fanfic. My fannish impulses don’t express themselves that way; I write individual stories because I come up with specific concepts, not because I have an ongoing engagement with the canon, or am linked into the social community of that fandom. Taken from the other direction, I generally only read things if a friend has recommended them, and a lot of what I read ends up not meaning a whole lot to me, because I lack the context or the interest to receive it properly.

But there are exceptions. There are fanfic stories I not only read, not only love, but remember for years afterward.

And, as I realized a while ago, they all have a common trait.

For a fanfic to really stick with me, it needs to be doing something extra, beyond just being fannish. (There’s nothing wrong with being fannish, mind you — it just isn’t what I read for.) Something intellectual, something critical, which can’t be done by writing original fiction, because that would lose the closeness entanglement of its commentary, and can’t be done by writing straight-up criticism, either, because that would lose . . . something harder to put my finger on. Stories that strike that balance make me absolutely giddy as a reader.

I’d like to share with you a few examples of what I mean, with explanatory notes. (But, uh, be warned — I guess the stories I like share two common traits. The thing I mentioned above, and the fact that they’re EPICALLY LONG. The two rather naturally go hand-in-hand.)

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It had to happen sometime

Last month, for the first time since we launched the group blog in August of 2007, I missed my post at SF Novelists.

But I’m back this month! With the first of what turned out to be a two-part thing (since otherwise my post would have been unreadably long), on how competence is hot. (With bonus links to several people trying to pose like the men and women on book covers.)

Comment over there, no login needed, etc, but if you’re a first-timer please wait for me to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.

Locus Podcast on, um, everything?

I thought I had linked to this here before, but if so, I can’t find it.

During World Fantasy, Karen Burnham of Locus sat me and Kari Sperring (la_marquise_de_) down in front of a microphone to talk about a topic of our choosing. We chose Kari’s “history is not a theme park” rant, and went from there, to, uh, everywhere. Subjects touched on included: The Three Musketeers, Aztecs and cultural relativism, Biblical archaeology, hemming clothing, stew, Mongolian steppe ponies, Minoan murals, authenticity in history, hippie elves, late medieval English blacksmithing guild laws, the Great London Plague of 1665, trousers and pigs, Biblical archaeology, kicking postmodernism in the head, seventeenth-century Parisian mud, telepathic wombats, and “the answer to almost everything is turnips.”

All these things and more await you on the Locus website. You can listen to the file there or download it for later hearing. We ramble on for about an hour and twelve minutes; Karen said afterward that normally she waits for a lull in the conversation, then steps in to say “well, that about wraps things up.” With us, she had to go in with a crowbar, or we would have kept rolling for another hour. We enjoyed it a lot — well, certainly I did — and I hope you do, too.

Signal Boost: Trust and Treachery

You know how we keep having these discussions about anthologies that take the best stories, regardless of who writes them . . . and somehow those stories end up all being by white men? (Totally by chance, you understand, and the editors can’t be blamed if that’s what was sent to them.)

It’s nice to be able to talk for once about somebody doing it right. I’ve been contacted by the editors of an upcoming anthology, Trust & Treachery, who are actively reaching out to get more quality submissions from women. To quote:

One of the items that we made specific mention of in our original call for submissions was that we’re looking for works representing the entire range of experience — including all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, sexual orientations, abilities and views on life. The world of fiction and its characters, especially genre fiction and speculative fiction, can be diverse places with a richness and depth in both culture and community. As editors, we made both a personal and professional commitment to have that same richness represented in this anthology. But we need to you help us do it.

This? Is good, pro-active editing. It’s realizing that imbalances aren’t automatically a reflection of the fiction that’s out there — only the fiction that’s being sent in. And that’s something that can be changed, with a little effort.

So I’m happy to give them a signal boost. Description of the theme is here, and submissions guidelines are here. And props to Day Al-Mohamed and Meriah Crawford for their hard work.

Almost missed it!

Gah. The sixteenth not only sneaked up on me this month; it almost sneaked past. But I ran over to SF Novelists and dashed off the next (and probably final) post in my “Research for Writers” series: Get Help.

Comment over there; no login needed, but if you’re a first-time commenter give me a little while to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.

Award nomination!

I was supposed to sit on this a while longer, but somebody apparently jumped the gun, so now I’m allowed to tell.

Romantic Times (which covers a great many things besides romance) is holding its Reviewers’ Choice Awards, and With Fate Conspire has been nominated! In, er, the “Epic Fantasy” category, which is not what I would have expected — but hey, I’m in good company:

THE WISE MAN’S FEAR Patrick Rothfuss, DAW, (March 2011)
WITH FATE CONSPIRE Marie Brennan, TOR, (September 2011)
THE COLD COMMANDS Richard K. Morgan, DEL REY, (October 2011)
THE KINGDOM OF GODS N.K. Jemisin, ORBIT, (November 2011)
STANDS A SHADOW Col Buchanan, TOR, (November 2011)

I won’t know the results until April. In the meantime, congrats to my fellow nominees, and to all the other nominated authors.